National identities in the context of Shakespeare's Henry V: Exploring contemporary understandings through collocations (original) (raw)

British Ill Done?: Recent Work on Shakespeare and British, English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh Identities

Literature Compass, 2006

This contribution to Literature Compass has a threefold purpose. First, it aims to do what it says in the title, and flag up recent approaches to British identities in Shakespeare studies. Secondly, it seeks to remind readers of an earlier and now largely forgotten tradition of nationalist criticism and scholarship preoccupied with the place of Britain-nation, state and empire-that flourished in the 1920s and 1930s. Thirdly, it endeavours to excavate some of the more obscure material on the subject that, because of its place of publication, may have been overlooked. The material collected here covers issues of borders, colonialism, culture, genre, identity, invasion, language, mapping, monarchy, plantation, union, and the matter of Britain, especially in the histories, though as will be seen this work encompasses most of Shakespeare's corpus. The short introductions to each section and the accompanying bibliography of over 300 items, ranging from notes and queries to substantial essays, is divided into six sections, beginning with a brief overview of the historical debate, then focusing on criticism dealing broadly with Britain, then embracing material ordered by constituent nation: England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. That there is an even spread of material under this handful of headings suggests that each and every nation within this multi-nation state, as well as the problematic and often contested whole, has attracted its fair share of critical concern. The Historical Background In recent years, historians and literary critics have become increasingly concerned with the make-up and break-up of the United Kingdom. The specter of an end to Britain has prompted the energetic exploration of British origins and identities. For historians, the early modern period is the time when the cultural and political foundations of modernity were laid, when nationhood and statehood were mapped out. Parallels drawn between the 1590s and the 1990s mean that the Renaissance, and in particular the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, have assumed a special relationship with the present. 'Topicality', the critical preoccupation with the ways in which Shakespeare's drama responds to the circumstances of its own time, now

"Where the devil should he learn our language?": Shakespeare's Territorial Linguistics

Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 2020

This article looks at how Spenser's desire for an English national identity, rooted in a "kingdom of our own language," is realized in Shakespeare's works. I track the way early modern systems of power have used language as a colonial weapon and show how Shakespeare demonstrates the problematic effects of imagining language as a scaffold to hold oppressive social structures-such as class, gender, and nationality-in place. Throughout his works-comedies, tragedies, and histories alike-Shakespeare consistently plays with the notion that there is a "right" and a "wrong" way to speak, and I argue he connects these definitions with the colonial notion of a "right" and a "wrong" way to be "English". The article examines language as space, in which "English" and "England" become synonymous. It explores language as a shared national identity in which language belongs to physical spaces as well as to peoples and a more abstract notion of nation. It explores the colonial imposition of the English language on indigenous populations that map the expansion of the known world in the early modern era, and looks at the tensions between the English and the Welsh-and their respective languages-in Shakespeare's plays. Ultimately, shows us the inevitable victims of linguistic nationalism and draws attention to England's long history of using language as a tool of abuse, oppression, and control. Keywords Shakespeare-Spenser-language-nationalism-colonialism-Wales-space

Introduction: Celtic Studies and Corpus Linguistics

Morphosyntactic Variation in Medieval Celtic Languages

Background to the volume This volume is a collection of eleven chapters that showcase the state of the art in corpus-based linguistic analysis of the old, middle and early modern stages of Celtic languages (specifically, Old and Middle Irish, Middle Welsh, and Cornish). The contributors offer both new analyses of linguistic variation and change as well as descriptions of computational tools necessary to process historical language data in order to create and use electronic corpora. On the whole, the volume represents a platform for the exploration of corpus approaches to morphosyntactic variation and change in the Celtic languages and, for the first time, situates Celtic linguistics in the broader field of computational and corpus linguistics. These chapters were originally prepared for lectures hosted by the Chronologicon Hibernicum project (ChronHib), an ERC-funded project at Maynooth University, Ireland (ERC Consolidator Grant 2015, H2020 #647351). The lectures occurred at three separate workshops (December 15, 2016, April 4, 2017, October 13-14, 2017), which brought together an international group of researchers with various backgrounds to help the ChronHib team gain insight into preparing linguistically marked-up text for statistical research on language variation in Old Irish. At the first event, all aspects of corpus building and use, such as morphological tagging, syntactic parsing and maintenance and sustainability of online databases, were discussed. In subsequent events, two main themes emerged: first, the necessity of developing computational tools such as morphological taggers/analysers and lemmatisers, and second, that careful use of corpora with a focus on new search queries yields progress on previously intractable problems of Celtic morphosyntax. 2 ChronHib and CorPH The overall goal for ChronHib is to develop a statistical methodology of linguistic dating in order to more precisely date the diachronic development of the Early Irish language (Old Irish: seventh to ninth century, Middle Irish: tenth to twelfth century) and thereby to predict the age of the large number Open Access.

Social Identity in Shakespeare’s Plays: A Quantitative Study

Unpublished PhD Thesis, 2017

This thesis takes three major claims made by literary scholars about Shakespeare’s use of language regarding issues of social identity. Each chapter introduces a critical perception of Shakespeare’s language - madness (Neely 1991), whorishness (Stanton 2000, Stallybrass 1986, Newman 1986) and questions of race, ethnicity and nationality (Loomba 2000, Hall 1992) – and applies a quantitative approach to the claims they raise. In doing so, I illustrate how digital resources such as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (Kay et al 2015), the Folger Digital Texts (Mowat, Werstine, Niles and Poston 2014) and corpus analysis software including AntConc (Anthony 2014) and Ubiqu+ity can be applied to a closed-set collection of plays understood to be written by Shakespeare (Wells and Taylor 1987, 109-134) to test claims laid out by literary critics. This thesis therefore shows how quantitative evidence can lead to a more complex and robust analysis of Shakespeare’s language than qualitative evidence is able to.

Irish English in early modern drama: The birth of a linguistic stereotype

2010

A number of dramatic texts are scrutinised here for the linguistic analysis of Irish English in the early modern period. A broad range of different plays by authors from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries are examined to determine if the non-standard spellings contained in these texts reflect genuine features of spoken Irish English at the time of writing. The analysis shows that some of the features which the textual record reveals have disappeared entirely while others have been confined to specific varieties in certain phonotactic environments while yet others persist in general Irish English today. The texts considered are furthermore useful when determining the earliest attestations for known features of Irish English.

“Englishing the Colonies in Shakespeare’s Henry V.” Re-presenting Shakespeare: Interpretations and Translations. Ed. Sarbani Chaudhury. Kalyani: University of Kalyani, 2002. 41-52. [ISBN 81-901525-1-3].

Re-presenting Shakespeare: Interpretations and Translations. Ed. Sarbani Chaudhury., 2002

Abstract The phrase ‘Shakespeare’s English’ gives the impression of a homogeneous, cohesive language, complete in itself. Taking Shakespeare’s Henry V as a test case I would like to demonstrate that it is essentially a polyvalent language in the making, with tenuous relationships being established between ‘pure’ English and its dialect versions. Focus on the imperialist agenda of Henry V is now a critical commonplace. A major mode realising this agenda is linguistic imposition. Scot Jamy, Welsh Fluellen and Irish Macmorris are Englished through their contribution to Henry’s triumphant nationalism and through their learning to speak ‘King’s English’, the language of the ruler. Similarly, French Katherine’s right to become the future queen of England is determined by her ability to ‘love in English’. The colonised Other and the defeated Other can share in the dream of United Kingdom provided they ‘articulate’ their Englishness. However, their articulation is English, ‘but not quite’. It is this distance between ‘pure’ English and its inferior dialectical versions as it were, which becomes a paradigm of the fractured nationalist-colonialist discourse. Ironically, only two generations earlier, the superior purity of the English vernacular upon which the play focuses, had been categorised as an inferior and alien Other in relation to Latin, the language of the empowered in England.

Transtextuality, (Re)sources and Transmission of the Celtic Culture Trough the Shakespearean Repertory

2019

This dissertation explores the resurgence of motifs related to Celtic cultures in Shakespeare’s plays, that is to say the way the pre-Christian and pre-Roman cultures of the British Isles permeate the dramatic works of William Shakespeare. Such motifs do not always evidently appear on the surface of the text. They sometimes do, but most often, they require a thorough in depth exploration. This issue has thus far remained relatively unexplored; in this sense we can talk of a ‘construction’ of meaning. However, the cultures in question belong to an Ancient time, therefore, we may accept the idea of a ‘reconstruction’ of a forgotten past. Providing a rigorous definition of the term ‘Celtic’ this study offers to examine in detail the presence of motifs, first in the Chronicles that Shakespeare could have access to, and takes into account the notions of orality and discourse, inherent to the study of a primarily oral culture. The figure of King Arthur and the matter of Britain, seen as t...